- Really enjoyed the inclusion of the music track. It went as well with your notes as I can imagine it going with the imaginary trailer.

- Like Julie, I’m unfamiliar with Tao Lin’s writing, but the excerpts here conjured “Catcher in the Rye” for me. Am I totally off base?

for some reason i’ve always liked references to specific named things in old works–even if they were no longer relevant / recognized. little mentions of saloon names or trading companies in Jack London stories come to mind. Farewell to Arms mentions names of bars, newspapers, i think. to me, having the story ‘grounded’ in a particular time and place make it seem more, not less ‘universal.’

but just going into mad detail about brand names in and of itself has been tried also. see American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. i couldn’t really get into that book.

‘wonder whether this kind of advice is even relevant anymore,’ hear you.

honestly i feel sometimes like the only advice that seems relevant is for writers to just write what they see / hear / feel / imagine in the way that they themselves would want to read.

there’s so little diversity when it comes to writing styles. think about art, music–how many different ways people express themselves. with writing it’s so homogeneous.

maybe because of all that advice we learned in school?

i liked SFAA and wanted to study it because it seemed original. you can totally find influences like the ones I mentioned above, but overall it seemed like Tao Lin took whatever influences and synthesized them into something that was his own original expression, as you say, ‘with little or no concern for the future.’

One of the things that strikes me about Tao Lin’s writing (at least the excerpts you include here; I haven’t read any of his work) is how grounded in the actual moment it is. I once had a writing teacher who insisted that this kind of temporality (the references to modern businesses, to smoothies, that kind of thing) would ultimately kill a work; its shelf life, he argued, wouldn’t be long because it would be full of references that wouldn’t make sense to a reader 10 or 50 years down the road. I wonder whether this kind of advice is even relevant anymore. How many writers are writing to produce “classics” and how many, like Lin, are writing to simply capture this moment and reflect upon it, with little or no concern for the future?